This application is related to U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/779,210 (TI-30144) incorporated herein by reference.
This invention relates in general to telecommunications, and in particular to personalized audio signals for incoming calls on communication devices.
Communication devices, e.g. cellular telephones, cellular digital telephones, personal digital assistants, landline telephones, portable computers, and personal computers, are becoming more and more ubiquitous around the world. A large percentage of the population in first world countries already uses one or more communication devices on a daily basis. It is virtually impossible to find any public forum where communication devices are not present in significant numbers; especially those communication devices that allow the user to accept telephone calls. If the market projections of the manufacturers of these communication devices are to be believed, the use of such devices will only grow in the future.
With such ubiquitous presence of communication devices comes an attendant problem: distinguishing the audio signal for an incoming call on an individual communication device from that of other communication devices that may be in the same vicinity. Many manufacturers of communication devices that provide telephone capability have given the user the option to select an audio signal from a limited set of such signals that are preprogrammed into the device. This option helps with the problem but does not totally eliminate it since users of the same type of communication device may select the same audio signal. Also, the audio signals selected by the various manufacturers to pre-program into their devices are very similar.
A primary object of the present invention is a method and apparatus for creating a personalized audio signal for incoming calls on communication devices. The present invention provides a communication device comprising a mechanism to accept user input for selection of options. In response to selection of an option to create a personalized audio signal, recording circuitry accepts audio input and creates a call signal audio file. This call signal audio file is stored in memory circuitry and is played when an incoming call is detected.
In another form of the invention, processing circuitry on the communication device applies audio compression, filtering and coding algorithms to the recorded audio input when the call signal audio file is created.